What Bowling Teaches You About Skillful Meditation 🎳
Understanding 'deviation' and how to correct for it.
📍 Coordinates: Mississauga, Canada. 🇨🇦
📖 Reading Time: ~5 minutes.
🧉 Housekeeping: We are a few weeks out from the Warrior100. Many have already taken the leap, and we will have a hard cap of 300 warriors. Will you be one of the 300 bold enough to go through this initiation? Join us.
Two weeks ago, my aunt and my 12-year-old cousin who live across the country were visiting my family and I in Toronto…
For a rainy day activity, we went bowling. 5-pin bowling, to be exact. If you didn’t know that exists, it’s a Canadian thing apparently!
About halfway through the game, due to frustration from more than one of us, we popped up the bumpers on the sides of the lane.
Bumpers serve one purpose: they correct for deviations in the bowling ball.
When the bowling ball deviates from its objective (to go straight down the lane and hit the pins), the bumpers are there to get it back on track. They course correct.
One of my favourite ways to describe meditation is that meditation is the process of correcting deviations in attention.
You have a desired objective (to hold your attention on the object of meditation), and you correct it whenever deviations happen.
When your mind deviates from your objective, you notice this, and like conscious bumpers, bring your attention back on course.
You do this over, and over, and over again. Eventually, just like bowling, you become skillful enough that you can hit your objective without the need for bumpers. Your attention goes straight down the lane, without deviation, and hits the object of meditation directly.
The process of eliminating deviations in attention benefits every area of your life.
It makes movies more enriching. It makes your conversations deeper. It makes your mind less scattered. It gives your loved ones a greater presence from you.
Now, what if your objective was different? What if the objective you were aiming for was integrity?
To have your thoughts, words, and actions in alignment.
Can you correct for deviations in honesty, truthfulness, and personal integrity? How would you do this?
Most of us, myself included, deviate from honesty and our own lived truth, far more than we would like to admit. And certainly, far more than we’re consciously aware of.
Just like meditation, once you start to do it, you learn quickly that it’s easy to be lost in thought for minutes at a time before you realize you have deviated from your objective.
Deviation from honesty is corrosive to the health of a society, to the health of relationships, and to the health of humanity’s heart and soul. If we cannot be honest with others, if we cannot act on our own truth, truly, what else do we have? We’re living in a complex labyrinth of lies.
Fortunately, it is possible to correct deviations in integrity, and the process is exactly the same.
Set a clear, conscious intention: to speak honestly, and to live in alignment with our truth at all times.
Bring the light of awareness to moments when you deviate from this objective. An “integrity audit” if you will. Every day before sleep, review the day and notice when you weren’t honest, where you thought a “little white lie” was more appropriate than the truth, or those moments where you wanted to do something, but chose a different action instead.
Take action to resolve the previous deviations, and renew your commitment to your intention moving forward.
This is the same process as meditation, and the results are the same.
Over time, you notice deviations faster, develop the skillfulness to correct more efficiently, and they become fewer in number and further spaced out in time.
You also gain more sensitivity and notice subtle deviations that were previously unconscious.
What you are left with is deep integrity. And that, if anything, is something worth aiming for.
Finally, what if your objective was increasing your performance, consistency, and discipline?
You guessed it, the same process:
Set your conscious intention to do X regularly.
Notice when you don’t do it, note what got in the way.
Take corrective action to resolve the deviation, and renew your commitment.
By following this process, instead of your action being the exception to your current behaviour, it becomes the norm. It is the default course. Now, all you need to do is correct for deviations, and continue on.
This process – correcting for deviations with compassion and clarity of awareness – is precisely what we are doing in the Warrior100.
Training concentration meditation to create undeviating focus and attention.
Training integrity through daily audits and resolute commitments to create undeviating integrity and honesty.
Training action and commitment to create undeviating consistency and discipline.
Every aspect of this program has been carefully curated and tested to help you achieve this.
Weekly intimate group discussion to help you discover why deviations occur.
Motivation and compassionate accountability incentives push you to stay on course.
A host of software tools, gamification incentives, live community, and curated curriculums make this process clear, straightforward, and dare I say actually enjoyable.
These may seem small, but I invite you to consider that this is the very foundation of your life and your relationships with others and yourself.
Are you trustworthy? Do you tell the truth? If you say you are going to do something, will you do it? Can you maintain your focus? Can you pursue a goal over time?
Correcting for deviations is the bedrock of a meaningful life, and of a life well lived.
The Warrior100 is an impeccable container to help you train the skills needed to correct for and completely resolve deviations of integrity, attention, and discipline.
We begin on September 1. If this resonates with you, if you understand how important this training is for your own life and for the health of our culture, I invite you to join us.
Use ‘SERIOUSPLAY’ when you sign up and I’ll put all of us in the same group so that we can do this course-correcting of our character together. I hope to see you there.
With love, EB. 💛